What Would Jane Austen Do?

Guest Author - Elizabeth Darrach

Hello, and welcome back! It's been a crazy-busy week here, and I should be packing to go to BEA in the wee hours of the morning, but I wanted to get this review up. Later this weekend, I've got some other books still on my desk that I'll list in the forum, as they're not going to merit review space this time. I've actually started on the June books in my reading, and there are some good ones.

This time out, I have Laurie Brown's What Would Jane Austen Do? (Sourcebooks). Eleanor has gone to speak in England for a Jane Austen festival, trying to get her costuming business off the ground. Only things aren't going quite as she'd planned. Her room reservation has been cancelled somehow, so she's stuck in a suite no one else wants to use because it's inhabited by a pair of ghosts, the Cracklebury sisters, Mina and Deirdre, whose family lived in the house long before it became a hotel. Eleanor doesn't believe in ghosts, though; she just wants to get some sleep before the festival begins in the morning. But Mina and Deirdre have other plans for her. When Eleanor gets up in the morning, she thinks she dreamed her very strange conversation with the sisters in the middle of the night, but she finds she's actually gone back in time to when the sisters were still alive, and Eleanor's job now (as agreed to during the midnight conversation) is to pose as their long-gone cousin Ellen and stop their brother from fighting a duel that kills him. And to do that, Eleanor has to keep Lord Shermont from seducing one or both of the sisters. Little does she know that he's got a secret agenda for his own visit, and it doesn't include seduction of the Cracklebury sisters. But he might just work his wiles on Eleanor, because she might be the spy he's there to ferret out. James and Eleanor are a charming couple, both keeping secrets but both wanting to stay with the other, no matter what. Sisters Mina and Deirdre are much more fun in their ghostly forms, I thought, than in their real life forms when Eleanor travels back in time. I did really like the way Brown wraps up the romance, however, better than in her last book. This one has earned three and a half of Cupid's five arrows.